Today's lesson about going with the flow

Today we had the second annual meeting of Ontario iGEM teams. Last year's meeting was held at Waterloo since we were the ones organizing it, but with the aim of increasing iGEM's visibility within the microbiology community (which has a lot to offer iGEM in terms of faculty and graduate student support), we decided to hold this year's meeting at the 60th Conference of the Canadian Society of Microbiologists. Despite a number of hiccups and hitches in the organization process, the meeting ended up being fairly productive, and I was (somewhat unsettlingly) satisfied at the end of the day. Other musings regarding the meeting will most likely end up here at some point, but I think I learned one important lesson today about going with the flow:

Do not argue about going with the flow.

Going with the flow is something that will happen when it's necessary, whether you plan for it or not. No matter how much of a consensus a group might reach on following a given Super-Awesome Plan of Action, if the plan just doesn't seem to be working in practice, like it or not, the group will then have to devise another strategy — whether this means scaling back a project, redefining previously assigned roles and responsibilities, or any other changes that are appropriate for the given circumstances. But it seems like, in many cases, it's difficult to generate agreement to play things by ear, perhaps because such arguments are often mistaken for opposition to having a Plan A.

Of course you want to come up with the best plan you can for achieving your objectives, but, even when you've learned from firsthand experience that such plans aren't especially likely to pan out as hoped, trying to get people to agree to be ready to adapt if and when the situation calls for it is a waste of energy given that they won't have a choice in the matter when it comes down to it.

There's more I wanted to say on this, but I am losing (very badly) the battle to stay awake, so I leave it at that for now.

Something from nothing

For a while now, I've been meaning to write about my recent thoughts on my iGEM team, but (despite multiple reminders in the form of blog posts by other iGEM-ers) I kept getting distracted by other things. Somewhat ironically, a chat with a certain blues-ing gentleman about my lack of dance-related posts lead to discussion of torch-passing, which is exactly what's been on my mind regarding iGEM.

When I first got involved with iGEM in 2007, there wasn't really much of a team. It was our first year competing independently (rather than as a joint team with UofT, as in the two years before), and though there were a handful of interested students, there was essentially no structure or organization, let alone defined roles. At the start of the competition year, aside from a bit of money we had left over from the previous year's fundraising efforts, we also lacked resources (not to mention lab space).

That first year, three of us were doing almost everything, from fundraising to securing lab space, to designing the project and learning lab techniques, to working in the lab until ridiculous hours of the night and training other students in the lab skills we'd only just learned ourselves. A few other students were involved as well, but it was the three of us who were trying to build a team from pretty much nothing, holding everything together and driving it forward. (I remember how it was like Christmas, the day our first set of equipment and lab supplies came in: pipettes, glassware, gel rigs, agarose, media, petri plates... and a new prof in Biology was generous enough to let us use his then-empty lab, since he had no students at the time. Later we migrated up to the bacterial genetics lab that one of the three of us was working in that summer, which in turn led to that prof getting interested in iGEM and becoming one of our faculty advisors.)

At some point Andre likened our efforts to get the team going to trying to erect a tent from the inside: having to hold up the sides and establish the structure, until hopefully it gets stable enough that you can let go and get out of it without it falling down on you.

By spring 2008 the three of us had all graduated, but I was still in Waterloo doing research, and ended up holding the tent up myself. Without the other two equally committed members to rely on and to share the workload with, I gained a new perspective on developing the team. And being the last remaining member of that trio of insanity, the issue of how to build the team into one that would be sustainable long-term loomed huge in my mind: at that point there was no one else I could have handed things off to, and the situation wasn't helped by Waterloo's co-op program, in which students alternate work and study each term (nor the fact that the most knowledgeable/experienced students are generally the ones who are about to graduate). So the focus shifted onto recruitment, as well as training and integrating new members, with the hope that some of them would stick around and take on leadership roles themselves.

And it's a very tricky thing, finding that perfect combination: enough interest in the iGEM competition itself; enough technical background to be able to contribute immediately (or enough desire to learn the necessary background independently); enough time/energy to put into the team, on top of coursework or work hours; enough terms remaining in their degree that they'll be around to put the benefit of their iGEM experience back into the team; enough of a sense of the big picture that they recognize the need to groom others to eventually fill the vacuum they'll leave when they graduate. Anyone with some subset of these things can make a hugely valuable contribution to the team, but it's those few with just the right combination who will be the ones making the team successful in the long term.

Despite how jaded I quickly became about the vast majority of students who get involved solely to gain some lab experience or a line on their CV/resume -- into whom we'd pour substantial time and effort and resources, only for them to disappear come midterm season (perfectly understandable, but still disappointing and frustrating) -- there was always something about the beginning of each term that got me excited and filled me with optimism. So much promise and potential. Of course, then midterms would hit, people would disappear, and I'd feel like we were back where we started and that I'd been delusional in thinking that this would be the best term yet. But looking back, it was never delusion: each term was indeed better than the last, and, one by one, we were indeed gaining people who were in it for the long haul, taking the lead on design, lab, modeling, software and outreach.

Since I first became the last person holding up the tent, I've seen my role as doing whatever was necessary for the team to be as effective as possible. Early on, that meant things like training people in the lab, leading design meetings, and preparing funding proposals. As other members gained experience and took on more responsibility, my role adapted accordingly and became a more high-level team coordination/big-picture guidance sort of deal. Ultimately, I'll know I've been successful once I've made myself completely obsolete.

Last summer I even made run for it, seeing what would happen if I closed my eyes and my ears and left the tent... and most things actually continued to stand up pretty well. (... aside from fundraising... the financial situation gave me a bit of a heart attack when I came back in the fall... and member retention from that term was also quite dismal; both of these things mean the long-term view of the team needs strengthening).

Fast-forward to spring 2010. I've never been so optimistic about the team, and with good reason, it seems. Last week, for instance: I find myself sitting in a design/mathematical modeling meeting with Andre (who returned to Waterloo for grad school) beside me. To my right, the current modeling activities are being explained to the new members of the modeling group. To my left, at the far side of the room, the design team has split into two subgroups, each with a relatively new member explaining the current design to even newer members and guiding them in doing further research. This inexplicably warm, fuzzy feeling hits me. I lean over to Andre: "Hey, look... look around... look at what everyone's doing... and we're not doing *anything*...!"

So we're getting there. I'm really excited about the group we have around this term: two new co-ops who've quickly taken on leadership roles and seem genuinely committed to the team, plus a handful of returning members who are taking the lead on various aspects of the team's activities. A couple of these members have even been thinking longer-term, about the direction of the team, and how to keep it sustainable -- this in particular makes me super happy, since it's one of the hardest things to impart to those who don't really start thinking about it on their own. The one piece that's still kind of missing is fundraising, but if that's the only thing I have to worry about at the moment, that's still pretty awesome in my book.

Partly because this randomly just came to mind and partly because I can't think of a better way to wrap up this insanely long post, I leave you with a video from the 2007 iGEM awards ceremony. The finalists had given their presentations, the judges left to deliberate, teams started going up onto the stage to take photos while they waited, and the following spontaneously ensued:

This Is Your Brain on Music (Part I)

This is a book I bought years ago because of my interest in cognition, my love of music, and the fact that my curiosity about how we experience music and why was driving me crazy. For some reason (probably because I'd bought another half-dozen books at the same time), I started reading it then, but didn't get that far before I got distracted by shiny things and forgot about it.

Recently, in my theory development class, we've been talking about design and perception, and music (the way we perceive it, and our preferences relating to it) came up; it reminded me of this book. My music- and dance-related experiences over the last couple of years have made my fascination with this subject much greater than it was even when I bought the book, so I was eager to pick it up again and start reading it from the beginning. Here are a couple of passages from the introduction that resonated with me in a way they couldn't possibly have when I first read them years ago:

What artists and scientists have in common is the ability to live in an open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretation of the products of our work. The work of artists and scientists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth in its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today's truths become tomorrow's disproven hypotheses or forgotten objets d'art.

After I finished undergrad, during my final years of which I focused on molecular genetics and spent most of my non-classtime waking hours working on my school's team for the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, I -- by no means deliberately -- gradually stepped back from the nitty gritty technical side of synthetic biology, and found myself spending more of my time focused on running and developing my team. Having receded from the land of the hardcore technical side of science, I came to realize that I am (would it be ironic to say "at heart"?) a scientist, in terms of the way I see and think about the world, the questions I'm given to asking, and the way I evaluate information on a day-to-day basis. Meanwhile, I'd become much more immersed in a world of art. Of music, and of dance, and of expression of whatever is alive inside us, trying to get out. And, feeling almost like two completely different people in each of them, I've all the while had a hard time reconciling these two worlds of Science and Art. I'm still not sure how I can do so in a practical sense (or whether I can), but reading that passage was strangely comforting; it made me feel more like a single person.

... I was going to include another excerpt here (actually, the one that I wanted to comment on in the first place), but I'll leave that for tomorrow.

Yesterday I fell in love. (Too bad it's unrequited.)

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

- Ernst Mach

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

- Bertrand Russell

These two quotes were amongst many presented to my theory development class at the start of the term, and when I read them I thought, "Yeah, that's so true..." I thought they were great quotes. But I didn't really get them -- really *get* them -- until yesterday.

The lecture was on thinking and representation, and it included discussion of concepts and how we label them with words which are separate from the concepts themselves. We discussed a paper about concept maps as diagrammatic representations of concepts and the relationships between them: how Y changes as a result of a change in X (e.g., if X increases, Y inceases as well, depicted by a + on the line from X to Y).

Though useful, this type of model has at least one obvious limitation: it can't represent precisely how Y changes as a function of X. Many concepts, such as motivation or productivity, are not easy to quantify meaningfully. However, if we are able to measure X and then measure Y and we observe some kind of pattern as we vary them, we can apply a mathematical model instead. My prof used the example of Newton's Second Law, F=ma, and went on to talk about why it's a "perfect model", including the way it's quantitative, testable, generalizable, etc.

But then one student interjected and asked whether it really is such a great model -- does it really serve to convey the relationships between the concepts it relates? He elaborated to the effect of, sure, he "knows" that "force equals mass times acceleration" and can do the related computations, but conceptually, he doesn't *get* the relationship between these concepts from this equation: the prof agreed and went on to ask, "What does it even *mean* to multiply mass by acceleration? Or, if we want to determine acceleration, to divide force by mass??" Conceptually, how do these concepts relate to one another?

Here I suggested that this is where cognition comes into play: as humans, we obviously have cognitive limitations and can only represent so much and manipulate those representations so much before we run out of usable memory and processing ability. For me, I said, classical mechanics makes sense at a conceptual level. I have mental representations of force, mass and acceleration, and I can conceptualize the relationship between them independent of words, numbers or variables. But electromagnetism? V=IR? Sure, I can do all the math just as well as for anything else, but even if I can mentally represent (or "wrap my brain around") the concepts of potential, current and resistance per se, hell if I could successfully represent the *relationship* between them in terms of the concepts themselves. To think about the relationship itself, I have to resort to some kind of analogy involving, say, water and pipes.

And this is where I suddenly *got* it, what it means to say that abstraction is a tool -- that mathematics, the "highest form of abstraction in human thinking", is a tool. If I want to move a box from point A to point B, I can pick it up and carry it there. But if I want to move a whole skid of boxes, I need a forklift to help me.

Abstraction allows us to "[separate] the number concept from what [is] being counted" (Bronowski, 1976). As my prof had put it earlier in the lecture, "Back in the day, we'd think about five trees or five sheep. And then one day some guy comes along and says, 'To hell with the trees and sheep. I'm just interested in this concept of five.'"

Math in particular allows us to completely let go of mental representations of the concepts whose relationships we need to consider. If we can tie numbers to certain concepts by measuring them and observe, through scientific experimentation, a pattern that's consistent with an established mathematical relationship, we also don't have to worry about conceptualizing the literal relationship of these concepts to one another: mathematicians build various forklifts and describe for the rest of us where they'll go if we manipulate the controls in certain ways (and even, if they're especially brilliant/lucky, invent entirely new kinds of forklifts that can pick up different kinds of skids, or even objects that aren't on skids). So if I want to know what happens when I increase the mass and acceleration of an object by so much, I can get into my forklift, manipulate the controls according to some instructions that have been shown to drive the forklift from point A to point B, and not be bothered with actual the skid full of boxes until after I've already moved them. Then, I can get out of the forklift and see that, okay, this is how strong of a force I now have. Manipulating the controls has *nothing* to do with picking up the skid and carrying it myself (were it possible) except the result it achieves.

The magnitude of this sent my mind reeling -- how ridiculously powerful a tool math is, given how well our minds are able to represent concepts and the relationships between them (i.e., not very) versus all of the crazy things we're able to do as a result of circumventing these cognitive limitations. Constructing 50-storey buildings that won't collapse on us? Consider even just the chemical and mechanical properties of the metals, the woods, the concretes... let alone how those play into how much of each you'd need and where they ought to go. Here, those quotes from the beginning of the term came to mind:

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

- Ernst Mach

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

- Bertrand Russell

I sat there in class, just basking in my little epiphany and contemplating the implications, completely oblivious to the ongoing class discussion for at least a good five minutes.

I have fallen in love with math. I'd say "all over again", after having allowed myself to become and remain entangled in the depths of mathless biology for years... but I didn't know it well enough before to justify calling it love. Infatuation, maybe? But now, finally seeing it more clearly, I realize that I don't understand it, and it's eating me alive.

‘‘Mathematics is only patterns... [It] is not just symbols as names for concepts but is a system of relations with logic and reason built into its inner structure." (Feynman, 1975, 1999)

It finally became obvious to me, in an epiphany aftershock, what math research is. In the past I'd asked several math-student friends of mine what one actually *does* as a grad student in math (compared to physics students who smash things, chemistry students who blow things up, biology students who kill things, or social sciences students who... recruit people for studies). I'd never gotten a satisfactory answer: "You think. You read, and you think. ... ... and you play around with ideas until something fits."

"Um... okay..."

But yes! Just as those quotes before merely sounded true but now so effectively sum up what I finally *get* about mathematics, this now is so obviously the truth... In science one seeks to discover relationships amongst natural things and describe them in terms of simpler such things that have been previously observed and described; so too in mathematics, where one seeks to discover relationships amongst abstract concepts or other relationships and prove them using more fundamental ones that have been proven before. However, whereas scientists' substrate for observation and description exists as concrete objects the natural world, that of mathematicians is represented abstractly inside their own minds. Hence math research is indeed just thinking after all...

But this is what plagues me now: what are the "most fundamental" patterns, relationships, or concepts? How were *they* proven? *Were* they proven? Are some things just accepted as "true" or "given" (or are they assumptions of some sort), and if so, which things?

What are the irreducible elements of math?

Multitasking and me

Nicholas Carr blogged last month about multitasking -- or, rather, hypermultitasking and its implications. How we sacrifice depth of attention for breadth: "... concentration, contemplation, reflection, introspection. The less we practice these habits of mind, the more we risk losing them altogether."

One commenter notes: "Scarily, it also appears to be highly addictive - sort of like acquired attention deficit disorder, making it quite difficult to focus on one thing, even when it's necessary/there's time to do so." Another wonders about whether this may affect personal happiness.

I'd mentioned to my supervisor today that I have a lot of trouble attending to things/people/whatever for very long. Even if I've just asked someone a question and they're in the middle of answering it, I *think* I'm listening, but then half the time it turns out that, really, I zoned out 20 seconds into their response. Never mind paying attention to an entire lecture. Hell, these days, it's not uncommon for me to forget what I'm saying mid-sentence, my train of thought having spontaneously jumped tracks against my will.

This is something that I've been struggling with to an increasing extent lately, and it's something that I really want to fix. I feel like I've all but lost my ability to get -- and remain -- engaged in a single task. To sit down and read something, start to finish, without punctuating my reading with five other things. Even the very blog post that got me thinking about this in the first place: I clicked to the page, read the title and the first paragraph or so, thought something to the effect of, "Oh, this is interesting; I want to read this,"... and yet, moments later, found that I had -- for some inexplicable reason and without consciously intending to do so -- flipped back to Google Reader and was checking my other feeds. Huh?

This wasn't always the case: I definitely didn't have this problem during the first couple years of my undergrad... and I'm not sure at what point my powers of attention started to waste away into practically nothing. By default I'd blame the undergrad education system somehow... the same way I blame it for turning me into a highly time-effective assessment-acing machine whose mental-bulimia approach to studying got her through three years of school with strong grades and no learning. (Not of the course material, anyway.) And by "turning me into", I suppose I really mean "letting me get away with being" -- since, in my view, no proper education system would let such student-bots through at anywhere near the top of their class.

But yeah... I think that in this case I can't rely solely on my good ol' scapegoat, The Postsecondary Education System, and must regretfully point the finger at what in fact *made* my undergrad experience (in a good way): my involvement in iGEM. Or, more accurately, the combination of iGEM and my need to see the whole picture and have a hand in everything. Heading up my team involved dealing with not only the project design stuff, but the lab work, the marketing, the funding proposals, the dozens of miscellaneous administration issues, as well as the management and coordination of people (full-time co-ops and other members) involved in each of the above... while somehow also doing my own coursework or research, as the case may have been. And I loved it; for however stressful it could get, it was also hugely rewarding. But I got really good at having a billion unrelated things flying around in my head at any given moment, ready to deal with whatever came up from one moment to the next, and I got really used to constantly switching tasks, switching modes... going from working on a proposal to helping someone troubleshoot in the lab to rescheduling some meeting or other at the last minute... somehow managing not to suffer from severe mental whiplash, but eventually relating all too well to the left side of this comic.

At some point I got past the micromanaging tendencies I once had and *actually* wanted to give other people oversight of things... and I got into the habit of looking things over only to the extent necessary to pass them off to the right person -- that is to say, very superficially, without any serious thinking involved. And despite all of the books and papers I once used to read at great length, these days I have to actively focus on reading continuously, forcing my eyes not to flit down through the beginning and end of each paragraph on a hasty hunt for the key points. (Okay, so maybe my days as a student-bot are partially to blame after all.)

I suppose, considering that haste is what got me here in the first place, there is no quick fix for my problem. Perhaps curling up in bed with a nice, long book will be a good first step toward rehabilitation.

Day One

Yesterday was the first day of the new term. My first class was cancelled, but since I currently know, like, two people in my entire program and wish for this not to be the case, I sat around in the classroom chatting with a couple other students for the entire length of the class. My program is interesting since there are so many students from such varied backgrounds. Most of them come from engineering, but some are just out of undergrad while others have worked in industry for years before coming back to build on their education.

Sitting and listening to one fellow talk about things he's done (including a failed business venture and how he studied for some kind of project management certification test requiring 1500 hours of experience) and his views on the types of companies/firms he's worked for (I hadn't even realized there was a distinction between the two :|), I thought he fell into the latter category. But it turned out that he'd just graduated last year and, because of the economy, decided to continue into grad school instead of braving the bleak job market just yet, predicting that prospects for entry-level jobs in his area would improve by the time he's done.

I guess that's what co-op does for you: being able to come out of undergrad with experience working for several different companies (not to mention at least some kind of sense about things like The Job Market) seems like an incredibly valuable thing, and if I could have appreciated this back then in the way that I do now, I probably would have chosen a different undergrad program and done co-op. That's not to say that I regret opting for the program I did -- quite the opposite, in spite of my opinion of the program itself: on the path I chose, I met some incredible people who have without question, and without even trying, changed my life, and I think I learned a great deal during my undergrad, even if it wasn't what my profs were trying to teach us in class.

Part of me wonders how my experience compares to those of the people I'd be working/competing with if I chose the academia route versus The Real World. I currently have little idea of what The Real World is like, and I can't help but listen to people who live in The Real World and be in awe of their vast wisdom and experience, feeling like my little Academia Bubble self would never stand a chance out there. And so it feels especially bizarre to receive any sort of oohing and aahing at my description of the things I've been doing so far, relating to school and to iGEM (as outstanding as I think iGEM is, from the inside), from such vastly wise and experienced folks. I don't feel impressive at all (more like woefully inadequate, half the time), and hearing people make impressed noises in my direction makes me feel more or less like a fraud. As if I said one thing, but they heard something else altogether, and suddenly I've inadvertently but unavoidably lied to them.

I've now steered myself into a program in which I'm not only doing a thesis, but also a considerable amount of coursework, and I've signed up for the co-op option to boot (which is extremely uncommon for a thesis-based program). I suppose, really, there's no point in comparison with other people, even if it were possible; regardless of where in the pack I stand, all I can do is do what I can, the best that I can, and that will get me wherever it'll get me. If I can figure out where I want that somewhere to be, so I can direct my efforts accordingly, all the better.

But lately I've been finding it increasingly difficult to direct much effort anywhere. Maybe it's partly because I spent most of last term being sick, but I think it has a lot to do with how I feed off of other people's motivation. When I'm around people who want to do things, I want to do things myself. Thinking back to fourth year, I still can't believe how productive I was, with courses, grad school and scholarship applications, trips to various places to visit potential labs (and all the research that went along with it) and of course iGEM, the task set of which naturally expanded to fill every waking moment. I remember spending all day at the lab and coming home only to collapse into bed. Scraping ice off my windshield at 2 am before finally heading home. I probably complained at the time, but now I miss it. ... okay, maybe not the midnight car-cleaning, but I miss the non-stop Doing Things, and the seemingly endless well of Desire to Do Things. Whatever it was that compelled me to do the things that I miss in spite of the things that I don't miss. But it wasn't just me: it was me and my friend, who got me into iGEM in the first place. It's so easy to get -- and stay -- excited about things when you're doing it alongside someone. It's more than how spending all day working doesn't feel so much like working (and can even be enjoyable) in the right company: it's how the right energy from some people can make you want to push forward even when they're not actually around. A wonderful positive-feedback loop of passion and drive. That's what I miss most, I think. It's exciting. From time to time I still somehow find myself in a super-motivated sort of phase, but without the feedback loop it tends to fizzle out pretty quickly.

At the moment, however, I'm quite excited for the new term. The courses I'm taking seem really interesting, I'm eager to get going on my thesis, and there's a really promising group of students involved in iGEM this term, including our two new co-ops. This is the best part of the term: everything is so fresh and full of possibilities!

Preparations

I'm slowly inching my way toward starting to pack for my trip. I'm determined to pack even lighter than I did last time, my goal being a single not-entirely-full backpack. Some things that probably seem excessive but which I plan on bringing are a Portuguese dictionary and language book (not a phrasebook... I plan on doing some actual studying while I'm travelling), as well as a notebook and my sets of flash cards (of which I need to make more before I go... they take forever to cut and hole-punch :|!). I am torn about bringing my netbook. Part of the reason I bought it in the first place was for this sort of thing, but this time I am doing quite a bit more travelling *around*. Last time I stayed in one city and could therefore safely deposit my belongings at the hostel and not have to worry about them at all for the whole two+ weeks. This time, not only am I travelling through three cities, but for the first two there's going to be quite the trek from the airport to my hostel, meaning I'm reluctant to go completely broke on taxis, let alone twice. Normally I'd be fine about wandering my way through the city since I blend in well enough (pretty much all Brasilians I've met have told me I look Brasilian... whatever that means, since Brasilians can look like anything :P)... but the giant backpack is *just* a little conspicuous. (Just a tad.) I think it'll probably come down to whether it'll fit nicely in my bag along with everything else. :|

But my preparations so far haven't consisted solely of deliberation! I finally booked my hostel for São Paulo. I don't know why I put it off so long, considering it's the first place I'm going, but it turns out I was just in time: a day later and I wouldn't have been able to book online! :| I also went out today to exchange some money, and then I went to Shoppers looking for these little plastic travel tins to put cream-type stuff in. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did find this:

Which is a bajillion times better! :D!

I can't even begin to express how much I love containers. It's probably a bit unhealthy, the extent to which I do. I can't explain it. My friend suggested that it's because they're practical, which is probably true. But even that fails to fully explain the intense satisfaction I derive from finding the Perfect Container. I mean, when I come across some sort of nice box or bag or tin, or even bottle/jar (or envelope), I always want to take it and save it for some kind of special use. And I'll try to think of things I could use it for, but if it's a *really* nice container, I don't want to hastily assign it to some purpose and then not have it for something that it's even better suited for. So it'll just end up sitting somewhere collecting dust instead of containing things! (Travesty!) BUT! On the rare occasion, I'll have some particular item(s) that I need to contain -- they could be multiple instances of a single item, or various types of items, or maybe even just one Important Item -- and I serendipitously happen across a Perfect Container! It holds all of the items and is just the right size for them: little to no extra room for them to roll or jumble around in, messing up their Perfect configuration. The Perfect Container does exactly what I wanted it to do -- nothing more, nothing less. And actually *putting* the items into the Perfect Container and then basking in their Perfect Containment: inexplicably satisfying!

So I must admit, the container (set) that I purchased above is not a Perfect Container. It has more bottles and tins-of-various-sizes than I actually need. But I do need some of them, and think of all the things I could put in the others! (Not that I'll be able to decide what to put in them...) But that's not all! It's specifically a carry-on toiletry set, so it conforms to the "three-ounce containers in a one-quart clear, sealable plastic bag" thing. The bag is exactly one quart! So awesome! And obviously it's designed for the bottles and tins it comes with, so no extra loose space for them to jumble around in! :D!

I think this is the most gleeful anything has made me in the last couple of days. Including hearing that my iGEM team is getting funding that we're going to use for DNA synthesis (which is really, really awesome). Make of this fact what you will.

Actually, on second thought, it probably ties with finally finding the elusive *good* guava Juice at Zehrs, on my way from the currency exchange place to Shoppers. :9